I misremembered. I thought there was a network monitoring solution in the huge 12.0 appliance library. I'm sorry if I'm missing it. I've been looking for something to monitor and management the ridiculous number of servers running in our laboratory. Some are mad science; others are kind of vital.

I came across observium, and it looked perfect for our needs, so I thought I'd take it for a spin with TKL LAMP.

Observium is an autodiscovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP based network monitoring which includes support for a wide range of network hardware and operating systems including Cisco, Linux, FreeBSD, Juniper, Brocade, Foundry, HP and many more.

It's distributed via svn; installation is a breeze (there's an additionaly note for squeeze). I'm imagining a patch solution for it, and it's not really overtaxing me. It's a standard lamp patch. The cypto-inithooks are no longer so crypto. So a turnkey solution for the web app is just a matter of being able to create and admin user in the sql file and then setting a proper password for it on first boot.

I wanted to try this out so I built a patch for it. I opted to build it on top of the core appliance as opposed to the lamp appliance. I've installed it myself and added a few of my servers to it in order to try it out. Feel free to try it out and let me know how it works.

Fantastic. Glad to see that you picked this one up. Patched effortlessly. Less effortless is configuring the servers to be observed. I'd love to see a patch to bring servers to a state ready to be observed. I've scripted part of it. But the application monitors are very tedious (to me) to configure.

What I was thinking was to add these to the observium patch and add a wrapper script around the observium 'addhost.php' script that remote shelled into a server, checked to see if snmpd was already installed. If snmpd was not installed then to run these steps before calling addhost.php.

The other option is to make people ssh into the servers themselves and pull the package from the observium server and run it manually.

Of course, I'd need to add support for non-debian based distributions as well but that should be pretty trivial.

Observium is a fantastic platform, and the auto-deploy-SNMP-client portion would clinch this for my organization. I'm a bit bummed this petered-out, but I'm hopeful it was finished and just not posted.